


Deerly Departed

by OhThatJane



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Angst, Fawnlock, M/M, Mentions of self-harm, the forest - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-26
Updated: 2014-03-23
Packaged: 2018-01-13 21:18:14
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,876
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1241095
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OhThatJane/pseuds/OhThatJane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John moves into the woods post-Reichenbach. Sherlock keeps him company.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first ever fanfic, written because I love and adore Fawnlock. I should credit someone as this is not my invention, but perhaps it's a collective creation of multiple fans by now. I would also like to say that English is not my native language and although I do try, there are bound to be some unforgivable errors. If you find any, I will not get pissed off if you tell me. I will also be incredibly grateful if you comment. I mean it. :)
> 
> I was trying to be funny with the title but well, even if it doesn't work, I hope you'll enjoy!

The first time he hears the light _tap tap tap_ on the glass pane is at three in the morning as he holds on to his pillow, face bathed in moonlight. As he fumbles with the sheets in the struggle to get untangled it stops and hurried footsteps fade away into the forest. He passes a hand over his face and puts it down to imagination, never more fervid than after Sherlock died and he moved here to the deepest of the woods and started seeing him everywhere. The next day he works in the garden and sweeps up the leaves off the overgrown path, and if he sees imprints in the long grass he puts it down to woodland animals, curious about the strange dwelling in the midst of their domain. Sherlock would have hated it here ( _dull, boring_ ) where nothing ever happens. To him. Not any more.

At night though, he jerks awake again to the _tap tap tap_ at the glass pane and as before, it’s gone before he has the chance to struggle awake. He thinks about it, later, once he has made himself tea (yet another habit overgrown with memories like the path at his threshold), about the stealthy interloper disturbing his sleep. He seems to be fated never to sleep in peace, not before, when he woke in the dead of night to the tortured sounds of violin coming from downstairs, and not now. He takes out his gun, the one he brought to kill himself with if _when_ this experiment at a life after the fall eventually fails, and keeps it on his pillow, armed against the shadows of the night. But that night, there is no tapping, or maybe he is too far down in sleep to hear it. Instead, it comes at dusk, after he has plucked the weeds from the garden and shut the door against the light. _Tap tap tap_ again and he nearly breaks his leg jumping over the table to get to the window to see who it is. He only just sees an antlered head disappearing into the trees and he thinks deer, it’s just a deer but deer don’t tap.

He takes an axe to fell a tree and swings it over his good shoulder. The evenings are getting nippy and as the rain pelts against the cottage at ever more frequent intervals, he needs a blazing hearth to keep him warm (now there’s no mad genius to keep him running). As he walks down the woodland path, he can sense it moving in the greenery to his left, a long legged antlered creature, which taps at his window as if wishing to come home and then runs away, which stalks in the shadows as if afraid of a sun-tanned skin. John has no words to say it is welcome, anything, anything that can’t talk and ask him again and again why it is he’s still grieving. But when he stands still it bounds away into the trees once more, nothing but a gaunt outline of muscle and fur and a head of curls.

He sees it once again a couple of weeks later when he’s chopping wood at the edge of the clearing and he ends up clutching the helve for dear life when a pair of gray eyes locks him in place and the memory of that intent unyielding (brilliant) gaze ripples through him. Maybe he’s finally lost it, or maybe Sherlock has come back to haunt him, wouldn’t expect less of him the mad bastard. But no more tapping, now that the creature knows he knows.

There are a deer’s footsteps at the edge of the clearing. Maybe he’s been granted his last wish, to see Sherlock again however he can, whatever it takes. At night he leaves the window open and makes sure there’s a key in the lock. Maybe come morning there’ll be an antlered head pillowed next to his, in the place where the gun used to be.


	2. Words Unsaid

Deer can’t talk so John has to do without the deep rumble of an interminable monologue when he hoes the patch of vegetables behind the cabin. The first month Sherlock kept bolting into the forest ( _Did you hear THAT, John?)_ and he was left standing there, trying to stop what could never be stopped yet again. You can’t expect him to be different, not even now, he keeps telling himself because doesn’t he know what it feels like to be left in the wake of a brilliant mind. Sherlock understands, though, perhaps more than he did before. He knows now the secret humming of flies and what the brackish water from the forest brook tastes like, what a fox and a rabbit smell like when running never stopping through the downy green, he knows what patterns blood makes on a torn furred skin. He always comes back, in the end, an hour two days ten days later and John closes his eyes and buries his face in the crook of a long neck, whispering nonsense ( _You came back, came back to me_ ), shaking hands playing staccato on a scrawny back. God only knows if Sherlock knows, has come to understand the value of grief, of whispered words muffled against bruised skin.

 

John tries to teach Sherlock to speak, to _sit still for one second, Sherlock_ , to form words in a soundless throat. Perhaps he should give up, should accede to the fact that a deer cannot understand the meaning hidden in code, secret messages scrawled in black on rustling paper, a meaning different from a half-hidden forest trail. But it must be there, John thinks, lurking behind the soundless cords, his name buried in an unforgetting memory, one fact left after all. One name for which Sherlock came back. So he doesn’t give up, never can, and shapes meaning through moving lips and hopeful sounds in the twilight, Sherlock inclining his head just so, flicking his deer’s ears in a mockery of understanding. Perhaps it is too late now to try to give voice to all the things unsaid, never to be said, they never needed words between them anyway, did they, not when it mattered.

 

When he catches his foot in a trap long forgotten and covered in moss he wants to laugh at the irony of it all, Sherlock miles away he might as well be gone, again, like he was those years after the fall, letting John’s mind overgrow with ghosts. So it is up to him, once more, to get up, on elbows, deep breaths, on shaking knees, a stick in hand and fall and fall again, get up, tears streaming down his face because he can’t leave the deer who does not understand the scream of the kettle, the warmth of four sheltered walls, the sound of his name on John’s lips.

 

He wakes to the dimmed light of a lamp and a damp cloth, _tongue_ laving his cheek as consciousness threatens to overtake him and a pair of gray eyes ( _John, are you alright, are you alright?_ ) burning like fire into his skin. And he does laugh then because it seems they are fated to find a way to each other over and over again, to save whatever in them worth saving and Sherlock furls his brow and flicks his ears and this, for now, is all John needs.


	3. Time Heals All Wounds

To John woods are ageless, serene. Inside the cottage there is no changing of seasons, just the comings and goings of light. And yet it is there, the knowledge of limits, marking skin with a feathery touch of crow’s feet. Time endlessly slipping, the one thing even a soldier can’t beat. Mornings are cold as they startle John awake to myriad chances that are a consummate ache worse than his scars. He wishes sometimes he’d known how to forego this, to be once again free of the love that bruises. Sherlock will never be tamed. He steps through the woods, drinks from streams, runs with the wind, never stops. John can’t help but wonder if this is the day when he’s gone after all, come here for a time marked by an incessant heartbeat. But then when he gets up and pads with bare feet to the kitchen Sherlock is there, picking up books, sniffing slippers and upending cups. And John has to smile at the desire of the deer to find a reason for these endless contraptions, as if being here, here now were not enough to be getting on with.

 

Sherlock’s trust is like a promise, but he can’t really ask (much as he’d like) to just _stay, stay with me,_ a minute longer, a day, however long it takes for him to stop longing for balance, a counterpoint to a frame roughened with years. John tends to him (hasn’t he always) when Sherlock comes back home broken and hurting, torso painted with a motley of bruises and John’s hands remember, better than his mind this collection of scars marking snow white skin. It seems branching trees leave traces of battle, every day adding to the tapestry of years. In the light of the fire they grow from purple to yellow, if they only have time John can watch them disappear, measure time by living skin. Even if Sherlock could still tell him, John doesn’t know if he’d ask after the time he’d been trying to live with the knowledge of loss, the space of one thought only always pressing itself to the foreground of his fractured mind. A lean body bleeding and splayed out at angles, like a very sick joke. Like a bruise left for always. Perhaps what’s asked of him now is to let go, to give without taking, trust that Sherlock has come back to stay. Perhaps all that is asked is to fix, touch without breaking, to keep Sherlock safe. The frailty of genius and the frailty of deer.

 

John doesn’t say it because sometimes words leave him lacking. _You were the best and the wisest man that I have ever known._ They sit on the front steps, shoulders and knees barely touching as Sherlock slowly relearns the taste of honey and milk and the purpose of the spoon, all these rituals now layered with meaning. John tries not to laugh, not to say that this _this_ is what he’d yearned for since Sherlock came back. The security to be had in the promise of permanence, however elusive, that will be as endless as time and as memory. So he sets traps like marmalade or a sweet brand of tea, scones on the mantelpiece and he hopes to fool himself, above all, that given time he can _will_ tame a wild thing. As everything, it comes after all when Sherlock licks strawberries from his lips and flicks his deer’s ears to say _Good, John, more?_ And John feels something bloom in his chest and thinks _Yes, let me. Let me be everything that you’ll ever need._ No need to tap at my window, no need to run, after all we have all the time in the world to relearn each other and perhaps then, like you did once, you’ll make me run with the wind.

 


End file.
